you out," is a natural law as well as a divine decree. It was not only
because David added Bathsheba to the catalogue of his wives; it was not
only because he coveted, like Ahab, that which was not his own,--but
because he violated the most sacred of all laws, and treacherously
stained his hands in the blood of an innocent, confiding, and loyal
subject, that his soul was filled with shame and anguish. It was this
blood-guiltiness which was the burden of his confession and his agonized
grief, as an offence not merely against society and all moral laws, but
also against his Maker, in whose pure eyes he had committed his crimes
of lust, deceit, and murder. "Against Thee, Thee only, have I sinned,
and have done this evil in Thy sight!" What a volume of theological
truth blazes from this single expression, so difficult for reason to
fathom, that it was against God that the royal penitent felt that he had
sinned, even more than against Uriah himself, whose life and property,
in a certain sense, belonged to an Oriental king.

"Nor do we charge ourselves," says Edward Irving, "with the defence of
those backslidings which David more keenly scrutinized and more bitterly
lamented than any of his censors, because they were necessary, in a
measure, that he might be the full-orbed man to utter every form of
spiritual feeling. And if the penitential psalms discover the deepest
hell of agony, and if they bow the head which utters them, then let us
keep those records of the psalmist's grief and despondency as the most
precious of his utterances, and sure to be needed by every man who
essayeth to lead a spiritual life; for it is not until a man, however
pure, honest, and honorable he may have thought himself, and have been
thought by others, discovereth himself to be utterly fallen, defiled,
and sinful before God,--not until he can, for expression of utter
worthlessness, seek those psalms in which David describes his
self-abasement, that he will realize the first beginning of spiritual